‘Totally their choice’: NC organization pays drug users to get on birth control
A North Carolina woman’s effort to combat the number of drug-addicted babies has landed in West Virginia this week, according to news reports.
Barbara Harris started Project Prevention, a nonprofit that pays drug users $300 if they opt for sterilization or “long-term birth control,” according to The Herald-Dispatch.
“We’re not dragging people off the street and sterilizing them,” Harris said, per The Herald-Dispatch. “It’s totally their choice.”
The birth control options include “intrauterine devices (IUDs), implants and tubal ligations,” the newspaper reports. More than 7,000 people have been paid as a part of the program, according to a WLOS report from last year.
Harris launched her organization when she adopted kids who were born to a drug user, according to the website for Project Prevention, which has a mailing address in the Charlotte suburb of Harrisburg.
“For her, doing nothing was not an option after her own firsthand experience raising four substance-exposed children,” the website says.
Years later, Harris this week is visiting Charleston and Huntington, West Virginia, to share information about the project, WCHS reports. The state in 2017 had the nation’s highest drug-overdose death rate, according to the CDC.
Harris’ project tries to “reduce the number of babies born addicted,” WCHS reports. She said people who are “strung out on drugs and alcohol shouldn’t conceive,” according to WLOS.
““It bothers me that some people focus more on the fact that the woman is going to get paid to get birth control than they do on the fact of what happens if she doesn’t,” Harris said, per WCHS.
This story was originally published March 25, 2019 at 3:44 PM.
